


The Splintered Bridges

by entanglednow



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-01
Updated: 2007-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-21 20:44:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/229674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/pseuds/entanglednow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The future is sometimes just more of the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Splintered Bridges

"Right where do you want to go?" The Doctor slaps his hands together sharply, then rubs them as if the possible array of destinations is too much to hold in. "Court of Louis the sixteenth? Oo, no how about Titan, they put a zoo there in the thirty fifth century you know. Or we could go to Mars...students protesting about mineral rights in the asteroid belt once used fungus to turn the whole planet purple. It won the Turner prize...well until it started eating people, the committee frowns on things like that."

Martha thinks the Doctor's finished, he sighs in a way that perfectly conveys nostalgia for pretty much every period in history she could ever not care about. It's a big sigh, a loud sigh. She leans forward on the console before he can fall into another, long, rambling historical monologue

"Somewhere where there's wide open spaces," she provides. "Somewhere where we can get some air and just breathe in the sights. Proper air, outdoors air, because that last space port thingy we were at didn't half smell funny."

The Doctor frowns. "That'd be because it's recycled, it's tourist air, been through at least twelve people before it gets to you."

"God don't that's disgusting," Martha tells him, more than a little horrified. "Not other people's air, new air, air that hasn't been anywhere near anyone else!"

"New air you say, well I know just the place," he says brightly.

She watches the Doctor spin things and twirl things in what looks, for all the world, like a totally random way.

"Just no more twelfth century eh?" She tells him. "There are only so many times you can watch dirty men in sacks run across a battlefield."

"One of those dirty men in sacks was a king you know," he reminds her. Martha fights the urge to make a rude noise.

"Funny, I didn't notice, did he have a nicer sack than everyone else?"

"He had a crown," the Doctor says absently, which just about says it all really.

"I'm sure it was a very nice crown, not that I'd know a nice crown from an awful one." She tells him, mostly with her fingers.

The Doctor gives her a sympathetic look over whatever he's currently twirling.

Her coat falls off of the seat behind her and the Doctor releases all of the controls and claps his hands together.

"There you go, we're here!" Wherever 'here' is he looks inappropriately excited about it. Which she should know by now is a theme of his.

"Where?"

"Go and take a look." He wafts his hands in a way that's clearly supposed to be some sort of encouraging gesture but instead makes him look like he's trying to shoo away a cloud of bees.

"Tell me where we are first," she says with a grin.

"What and ruin the air of mystery, the first stunned gasps of surprise."

"I know what your idea of a surprise is," she reminds him. But she still follows him when he bounds over to the door and swings it open.

It isn’t Earth, Martha can tell that much, because of the huge glass roof overhead, and she can see two suns, one much larger than the other. They're both yellow though, no sci-fi special effects where one was red and one was blue. To be honest it was one of those alien things that you didn't notice unless someone pointed it out to you, or you actually looked up and noticed.

The Tardis has materialised at the end of a long wide corridor, full of milling traffic, mostly recognisable people, in outfits Martha probably couldn't ever hope to place by century, or planet even if she lived as long as the Doctor. They seem very busy though, and no one's paying any attention to them...yet. It's amazing that she was ever worried about causing a diplomatic incident, when the Doctor is so fond of  poking, licking, shaking or blowing up things at a moments notice.

"Why don't people ever complain when you land your ship in inappropriate places?" Which is something she's always wondered but never thought to ask.

"Oh I'm sure they don't even notice." The Doctor's already got his hands out of his pockets. If he licks anything he shouldn't she's going to pretend she doesn't know him...again.

"It's a dirty great blue box!" Martha says sensibly. "You're telling me no one notices when you park it in their garden, or their embassy, or their space port."

"I don't 'park' it," the Doctor says and he makes the word sound vaguely insulting. Martha's not entirely sure how much of it is feigned and how much is genuine hurt. She wonders if it really matters since sometimes the Doctor seems to wear emotions like hairstyles, one stiff breeze and they make way for something completely different.

"Well it sticks out a bit doesn't it, the same way big square things usually do."

"It doesn't stick out, I'll have you know it's very aerodynamic in the way square things usually aren't."

"Have you got some sort of psychic stuff on it, like you use on people with that paper thing. So they see a tree, or a house, or a street lamp or something sometimes instead of what's there?" She waves at the Tardis.

"That would be a lot of good wouldn't it, if I wanted to find it again in a hurry," and now he's wearing the 'you're an idiot' face and Martha is determined to never stop being insulted by it.

"Yeah but it doesn't fool you does it, that would be stupid."

"It would be stupid." The Doctor nods agreement.

"It's like camouflage, or invisibility, you'd think there'd be more of that. Why isn't there more of that? I mean-" Martha stops talking.

The corridor has opened out into a huge balcony.

"Oh my god!"

It's the sky, as far as the eye can see, blue sky and trails of cloud stretch away from the city.

"It's a giant city in the sky," her voice sounds astonished, rough with disbelief, and she thinks she's grinning like an idiot, wide and something way beyond impressed. The balcony comes to her chest and it's not enclosed, she can smell the wind, feel every wild gust try to catch her. She glances down but can't see a thing, just more sky below, and it's amazing, and dizzying.

"This is amazing, my god this is amazing." The Doctor lifts both eyebrows at her, gestures with his head to the right.

She swings her own head round, and she doesn't know what she's expecting. What she gets is another city, a twin, hanging in the air.

"There's two of them...two giant cities in the sky. This is amazing!" Martha leans forward until the wind pushes at the trails of hair around her face. "How high are we? She twists to ask, changes her mind and shakes her head roughly. "No, don't tell me, god I can't even see the ground! This is insane, I feel like it wants to pull me off, like I could tumble all the way to the ground."

She laughs, doesn't even care that the Doctor's giving her one of his indulgent looks.

"This is the sort of thing people picture when you say 'futuristic,' giant floating cities in the sky." She reigns in the temptation to lean further, to let the wind push against her in a way that's reckless and crazy and utterly mad.

"How do they stay up?"

"Happy thoughts," the Doctor provides and she gives him her own special 'you're an idiot' face.

"No, really?"

"Oh it's very complicated," the Doctor tells her. "Contains lots of 'ics' and 'ologies,' and even a few 'ism's.'"

"You can be quite smug about the fact that you're so clever, has anyone ever told you that?"

"Oh people tell me all the time!" Martha takes four steps along the balcony, sliding across the stone wall, past curling artistic containers holding exotic plants. The wind is hard and loud, and furious, stealing half of her words when she tries to describe how amazing it is. She's fairly certain the Doctor only hears every fourth word, turning her enthusiasm into a jumbled random spray of words.

She's equally certain he knows what she wants to say though.

"How do we get to the other one?" She asks loudly, and her voice is high, maybe a fraction too high if she doesn't want to embarrass herself.

"Oh...you can't," he says simply, quick and certain.

"What? Why?" If it sounds like more of a demand than a question he doesn't seem to notice.

He inhales sharply, pulls a face and nods to their left. "Go round to the other side of the balcony." She frowns at him, but obeys, boots loud on the shiny white floor, sliding past paused groups of people, talking, working, drinking. The Doctor follows her at a lazier pace, stopping to say hello to people he probably doesn't even know.

She sees them as soon as she rounds the edge of the balcony.

"Oh my god..."

Two enormous bridges fill the sky, or what's left of them.

They must have originally been magnificent, long endless shining stretches of white and silver and grey, curved and twisting and formed where they sit, like a marvel of science. Hanging between the two cities, joining them both.

Now they're just looming, shattered, smashed apart and utterly dead, like vast, tattered gravestones. They're black and brown, strewn with debris, ruined like they burned for years, and starkly incomplete, gruesomely incomplete.

It's like a great hand has crashed into them both, rending great chunks out of their infrastructure to tumble down through the sky. She can't do anything but breathe cold air for a long moment, stunned.

Martha lays her hand against the wall, waits until the Doctor is a long quiet shape over her left shoulder.

"So what happened?"

"Oh, the same thing that always happens, someone says something, someone else doesn't like it." The Doctor tilts his head, makes a noise that manages to perfectly convey inevitability. "Someone else throws a stone and before you know it-."

"The sky's in pieces." Martha says roughly, digs her fingers into the stone until she can feel every dip and curve. "And no one ever fixed them?"

The Doctor sucks a breath.

"Well there weren't enough people left to fix them, besides they'd been a monument to what was best about their society, to communication and progress and vast over-expenditure- took a hundred and twenty seven years to build, not the sort of thing you could just throw up again."

"But to just leave them like that," Martha frowns. "Giant and hideous and crooked, bit of an eyesore aren't they?"

"I think that's the point." The Doctor says carefully, and Martha gets it.

"So now they're a monument to the stupidity of their society?"

Martha stops talking while two tall aliens in stark white clothing drift between the both of them, silent and serene and creepy as hell.

They don't so much as glance at the bridges, or the second city that takes up half the sky.

"But why? I mean it looks like it happened years ago, hundreds of years ago, and there's..." she waves a hand in a frustrated confused gesture. "No bridge."

"Someone decided it would be better if they stayed seperate," he provides and Martha can tell what a good idea he thinks that was.

"It's always 'someone' isn't it," Martha says tartly. "No one ever wants to take the blame for being the first one to make the suggestion."

It's quiet for a long moment, the wind tugs at Martha's jacket and the Doctor's coat as people flow past, not once glancing to the left and looking at the wreck, or their own city's twin. Martha remains quietly angry until they turn off at the second balcony.

"And that's how they live, apart like that, for good?"

"Oh I wouldn't say that," The Doctor taps on one of the pillars, drawing Martha's eyes back to the two ruined giants.

Someone has braved the outside, has crawled along the jagged broken edges of the closest bridge in the swirling bite of wind...and is stringing a rope between the two ripped ends.

He looks so fragile, a tiny speck of a figure trailing just a thin line of rope, swaying and flapping in every gust that threatens to drag him from his perch. It's insane and Martha can't help smiling into the wind.

"Humanity doesn't give up easily does it? Never does what it's told, we're stubborn like that."

"That you are," the Doctor says through a grin that makes him look utterly insane "That you are!"


End file.
